Harold Haliday Costain

These days, when an American brand wants to drum up publicity, it offers some free swag to Instagram micro-celebrities, happy to prettify their performed “real life” with whatever product comes their way. A century ago, it was safer to call up an artist. Harold Haliday Costain (1897—1994), trained as an illustrator, became one of the most adroit commercial photographers of the 1930s — providing American corporations with a bold, modern image that appeared nearly heroic in the years of the Depression.

“Sugar & Salt: Vintage Industrial Photographs by Harold Haliday Costain,” at this photography space in the gallery-rich Fuller Building, includestwo suites of his crisp, propulsive images of American industry. In 1934, he was commissioned by the International Salt Company to photograph its operations in Avery Island, La.; there Costain turned his camera on an angle to shoot vigorous views of a bare-armed laborer handling a hulking metal wheel, or a pristine metal helix grinding its way through evaporated salt. He also used lamps and spotlights to produce a dramatic view of a worker beneath a towering cliff of salt, so denuded and striated it appears almost like a lunar landscape. The photos of salt ran in the fledgling Fortune magazine; “a white thread through history’s tapestry,” wrote the magazine’s overawed reporter.

Costain brought the same high-velocity modernism — skewed angles, high contrast, shifting depth of field — to photographs he took the next year of the facilities of the National Sugar Refining Company in New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of sacks of sugar tower over a worker, recalling levees or even sandbags fronting the trenches of the Great War. A woman on the assembly line looks on beneficently as boxes charge diagonally across the composition. Far from the cautious boosterism of contemporary annual reports, these sugar photos bear a strong resemblance to Soviet photography of the period, by the likes of Boris Ignatovich and Vsevolod Tarasevich. That such similar imagery could advertise such divergent economic systems attests to the slipperiness of photographic style — and to the importance of looking past surfaces, even on the feeds of buffed-to-shine Instagrammers.JASON FARAGO

A good conceptual art piece is not very different from a joke, and Karl Haendel’s got a million of ’em. His show “Masses & Mainstream,” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, is a torrent of pencil drawings large and small, and all of them revolve, in one way or another, around the artist’s ability to make anything in the world into a kind of punch line merely by pointing it out.

There are old-fashioned gags like “Doorway in a Box,” a framed drawing of a wooden cupboard that sits on two wooden blocks on the floor, and ironic jokes about conceptual art, like the winkingly dumb “Baby With Question Mark.” Jokes that adeptly split the difference include “Richard Nixon’s Childhood Home Annotated by My Daughter” and “Am I Jared Kushner?” The first of these, a meticulous, four-foot-wide drawing of a photograph ornamented with childish doodles, captures the weird disconnect we often feel between public figures and their private lives; the second, simply a cursive list of similarities and differences between the artist and the president’s son-in-law, sounds the very special anger and despair that Mr. Kushner elicits in progressive Jewish men.

But it’s the straighter drawings, many of them hugely oversize, that offer the most alluring take on the transformative power of self-conscious looking. In them the viewer has room to appreciate Mr. Haendel’s relaxed confidence as a draftsman as well as the understated beauty of the found photographs he often uses as source material and of the graphite itself. “Stacked Lawnmowers” pictures four humdrum machines forming an unlikely monolith, and in “Down Box (Football #10),” a dense tangle of football players highlights the sensual appeal of a solid black background. WILL HEINRICH

Despite this momentum, however, Ms. Yiadom-Boakye, who won top honors at the Carnegie International exhibition last fall, still has room to grow as a painter. Her coffee-brown portraits of fictional people register best as groups, like an arrangement of family portraits. They feature people reading, lounging and resting in traditional poses. Her dark palette and the stillness of the figures gives her work a sense of timelessness that has fast-tracked them into contemporary art history: The work already looks timeworn.

The flip side of this, however, is a sense of familiarity and inertness; Her subjects can feel trapped in the canvas rather than liberated by it. The best work here features laughing subjects and a hint of movement. Multiple panels with a female dancer in a white leotard, or a singular canvas with male dancers, suggest something beyond the here and now, a perspective on people, history and looking that you expect painting to elicit.

Ms. Yiadom-Boakye’s most impressive effects are weirder though, breaking the ice of her generally conservative approach. When she paints the whites of someone’s eyes in two different hues, or adds a lightning stripe of color along a dark sleeve, she ignites the unexpected. It would be nice to see more of this. MARTHA SCHWENDENER